The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time

About the book

Originally published in 1979, the first volume of the bestselling "Gonzo Papers" is now back in print. The Great Shark Hunt is Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's largest and, arguably, most important work, covering Nixon to napalm, Las Vegas to Watergate, Carter to cocaine. These essays offer brilliant commentary and outrageous humor, in signature Thompson style.

Ranging in date from the National Observer days to the era of Rolling Stone, The Great Shark Hunt offers myriad, highly charged entries, including the first Hunter S. Thompson piece to be dubbed "gonzo" -- "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved," which appeared in Scanlan's Monthly in 1970. From this essay a new journalistic movement sprang which would change the shape of American letters. Thompson's razor-sharp insight and crystal clarity capture the crazy, hypocritical, degenerate, and redeeming aspects of the explosive and colorful '60s and '70s.read more

Reviews for The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time

I read this after having read most of the other Hunter Thompson books as a teenager, and was impressed less for the shock at the boozing and pills than I was at the immense scale and apparent hollowness of the Presidential political race. The value of the book in the long term, I think, will lie more there than in another example of how to abuse expense accounts.read more

More of the good doctors writings. This is a collection of essays and articles written over the early and middle part of Thompson's career. There was a notcible gap in publishing after Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72. Some might accuse Thompson of trading on his fame by trotting out old and sometimes uneven work, but there is more than enough here to interest and entertain. A must have for the Thompson fan.read more

Not quite sure what rating to give this book, so I think I'll skip that bit... I was really just dipping into this again after having seen Frost/Nixon, and wanting to get a bit of the ol' HST vitriol along with a flavour of those times. Did not disappoint, but I think a smallish amount of Thompson goes a long way, so I'll put it down again for now...read more

A compendium of what made Thompson great...namely a keen journalistic eye for the craziness of our times. Yes he did drugs, yes he drinks copious amounts of alcohol, yes he probably should have been locked up, but then we would have missed football chats with Richard Nixon, stories about biker gangs, horse racing, and the like. You have probably read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or seen that terrible movie, but what made Thompson great was not the outlaw "gonzo" persona, although that didn't hurt, but it was his ability to combine reality with a fiction that seemed to be almost believable which was never on better display than all the pieces within this anthology. As the Ventures should have said "Run, Don't Walk" to pick this bastard up at your local used bookshop.read more